Women's empowerment, maternal depression, and stress: Evidence from rural Burkina Faso

PR
IFPRI3; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all; G Cross-cutting gender theme; CRP4; DCA
PHND; A4NH
CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH)
Objective: Though there is a wide array of evidence that women's empowerment is associated with more positive health and nutritional outcomes for women and children, evidence around the relationship with mental health or subjective well-being remains relatively limited. The objective of this paper is to explore this relationship in longitudinal data from rural Burkina Faso. Methods: We analyze the association between empowerment measured using the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI), and two additional outcomes of interest: stress (measured using the SRQ-20) and maternal depression (measured using the Edinburgh scale for post-partum depression). The analysis employs both cross-sectional specifications and panel specifications conditional on individual fixed effects.